Mozilla Just Fixed an 18-Year-Old Firefox Bug (howtogeek.com) 61
Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek:
Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this."
The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.
The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.
The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.
The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.
So (Score:5, Funny)
Who knew that making version numbers add up really fast didn't speed up bug fixing!
What 2.0 bugs do you think they'll fix in version 220?
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Low-priority bug gets low priority... Why is this news?
Not every bug report matters. Not all but reports are even actual bugs. Some bug reports get fixed in the process of fixing others or by making some other update and no one notices. An old low-priority bug getting marked as 'fixed' is not a big deal.
Re: So (Score:1)
This should not have been low priority.
Also, nothing is so low as to be put offable for almost 2 decades.
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What makes you think that? You somehow survived "almost 2 decades" without this impacting you in any noticeable way. Hell, you didn't even know it was a problem before reading the summary.
Sounds pretty damn low-priority to me.
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I also survived about five years without firefox. I suspect I'll survive almost two decades without it in the future.
What does this mean for future of firefox?
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You've mistaken yourself for someone who matters again. We've been over this.
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So you really don't follow situation firefox is in with user numbers, and yet choose to comment in threads that talk about them?
Re: So (Score:1)
Cool. Thanks for illustrating why open source software has utterly failed in the consumer space.
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Wait... you think OSS has "failed in the consumer space"? LOL!
Congratulations! You're one of the dumbest people here, and that's saying something! Competition is stiff, but I think you've just cracked the top 10 with that one!
Re: So (Score:1)
Uhm, I can't think of a single OSS product that's consumer facing without a heavy layer of proprietary stuff on top. Web browsers maybe? Go on, give me some examples.
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Heh! This has to be the most "Ya so?" story to appear on SD in a long time.
Libreoffice, Drag Page With Middle Mouse--Not Yet (Score:2)
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Does the other three-button mouse user care?
Not that it matters, just do it yourself if you think it's worthwhile. What's stopping you?
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How do you -not- have a three button mouse?
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How do you -not- have a three button mouse?
Laptops and those using Apple mice.
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My laptop has a trackpad, and if you tap in the middle, it's considered to be a middle click.
That would be horrible.
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How do you -not- have a three button mouse?
Laptops and those using Apple mice.
Middle-click, and Middle-tap are both available on Apple mice. BetterTouchTool [folivora.ai] allows you to program a response to various gestures on the Magic Mouse, Trackpads, and other input devices.
Old Mighty Mouse had clickable scroll ball as 3rd button in 2005.
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Let's try that again:
Just do it yourself if you think it's worthwhile. What's stopping you?
css hijinks (Score:1)
Not a web head but that so called bug? Had some cool borderless effects on MySpace profiles back when they let you do stuff like that.
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yes, as obnoxious as it is, css is supposed to be a rendering standard and browsers are supposed to be compliant. if they don't, that's a bug.
it's actually surprising that this was considered low-priority for so long. for a while all browsers competed very seriously to be among the most compliant (well, all browsers except ie, of course). compliance is a critical feature (as opposed to e.g. random new ui gimmicks or adware).
Simple solution (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone surf the web using lynx. Plain text should be good enough for everyone. And if some 'artiste' graphics designer has a hissy fit because they can't make pages look kewl, so much the better.
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Stop liking what I don't like!
Sorry, kid. Design matters. It's also inescapable. Even in your fantasy world where everyone uses VT420 terminals for everything, there would still be designers making things look nice and improving usability. We'll have layouts, fake windows, and even ASCII-art banners and UI elements just like we used to.
And if some 'artiste' graphics designer has a hissy fit because they can't make pages look kewl, so much the better.
Umm... You're throwing a hissy fit over ... the mere thought that someone might design something? How sad is your life?
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Safari's "reader mode" is the best feature of any browser ever.
It's better than lynx because it removes -all- the designer crap, ads, and other shit and leaves pure raw happy content goodness.
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Either way, if you can strip off all that crap and still use the web site, that stuff wasn't necessary design or functional elements. It was window dressing. Which explains why it got pushed back for 18 years.
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that stuff wasn't necessary design or functional elements.
What? "Can be done at all" is not the same as "can be done well".
Here's a project for you: Give your criteria for distinguishing "window dressing" from "necessary design" and "functional elements". I could use a good laugh.
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I surf for content. If the web was 99% text with paragraph breaks, I'd be super happy,
Your turn: what design elements beyond that do you consider necessary and why?
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LOL! What on earth made me think you could read and understand my question?
Go ahead an try again. You should get an adult to help you with the "big" words.
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So you really didn't have a question. Just babbling ESL, got called out for babbling incoherently, got embarrassed at being called out for your inability to communicate and spent more time going as hominem then simply clarifying wtf you were trying but failing to say/ask because your fragile ego was shattered.
Got it. All clear. Done here.
Get therapy and anger management and an ESL class.
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So you really didn't have a question
No, you just can't read. Didn't I tell you to get an adult to help you?
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So you still can't explain what your actual question was because by now it would be horribly embarrassing and shatter your fragile sense of self worth to admit so plainly how dumb you are.
Instead you continue repeating stupid mindless grade school level attacks several messages later.
You had no question. You have no idea what you were trying to say. It is humiliating for you to admit that now. None of your other little AC buddies could say what you were babbling about either. Just more mindless attack.
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So you still can't explain what your actual question was
LOL! You're really going to double-down? Are you an idiot or just a masochist?
The question: What are your criteria for distinguishing "window dressing" from "necessary design" and "functional elements"?
I don't care about your answer. You're too stupid to have an opinion worth considering.
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That same mode is available on a good browser as well.
it removes -all- the designer crap
You have no idea, do you?
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No idea... what? That wasn't a real question in English. If you'd like to ask a question that parses I'd be happy to respond.
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Triggered! I love that. I readily admit to one vice: watching the thin skinned go ballistic over my user name. And usually as an AC because low self esteem easily triggered pussies are usually cowards, too.
Thanks for the great start on my day.
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Triggered!
Ah, the call of the moron. Shouldn't you be off spreading conspiracies on Facebook? This is a site for competent people.
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If this site is for the competent then you should delete your bookmark and get into an English for ESL class, fast.
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Your post is about 15 years out-of-date.
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Everyone surf the web using lynx. Plain text should be good enough for everyone.
At some point just swap over to the gemini protocol. [gemini.circumlunar.space] I recommend using Lagrange [skyjake.fi] as that not only supports gemini but also the upload protocol titan [communitywiki.org] (gemini is mostly a read-only (has the ability to pass <1K data to the server so the protocol is not suited for uploading whole files as the max size of any gemini request is 1024 bytes) protocol and Titan compliments gemini by allowing you to send data to a URI and the server writes the data you sent to that resource or whatever is handling that resource),
Darn it! (Score:2)
I saw "18 year old bug", and I hoped it was one of my still-open bugs...
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Have you checked to see if any of them have already been fixed, but not marked as fixed? If they're important to you, why haven't you fixed them yourself?
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LOL. Same here. There are so many old, ignored bugs I bet some of them are invalid now because they involve features Mozilla had removed from the browser now.
This is why I gave up on Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Designers looking for glory took over and all the focus went to how the product looked and not how it functioned. When XUL went away all the functionality went away and it became a bug ridden inferior clone of Chrome. I'm still on half a dozen bugs that haven't been touched in a decade. No one wants to do the grunt work, it's not sexy enough for the egos at Mozilla.
If the OP is flamebait... (Score:2)
....what explains Firefox browser market share being in the shitter?
https://www.oberlo.com/statist... [oberlo.com]
I remember when IE was only good for downloading Firefox. Today Edge has roughly twice FFs market share.
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well, maybe it was not poor bug-fixing but the reckless push to stay relevant at any cost: if you keep plaguing the userbase with constant pointless interface changes with no real value at some point they'll have enough.
also, chrome happened, basically.
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Good for them (Score:1)
It could be worse (Score:2)
They could have one of those systems that auto close all bug reports every time there is a new release and tells people they have to keep reopening if the issue persists after the release. The very fact bugs can persist as bugs for decades is kind of cool. Obviously better to see them getting fixed.
Was recently presently surprised (shocked) to see the last bug I submitted to Firefox was patched within a week and after a couple of months made it to release. Included simplified test cases and versions of F
Big news (Score:2)
The big news isn't that FF fixed an 18 year old but. The big news is that they fixed a bug.
describing this as a "bug" isn't really accurate (Score:4, Informative)
The behavior that's being removed here isn't really a "bug". Back in CSS1 and/or CSS2, the spec for floating
In particular, Gecko's behavior was to actually use the bounds of the glyph (rather than the font metrics for the whole font) to do layout for a floating first-letter, so that there wouldn't be extra space around it and it would align better. This was a better default behavior, but it was also somewhat less controllable since some of the standard inline layout properties (like line-height) didn't apply.
It also turned out that this better behavior wasn't good enough to really do good typographic first-letter effects. Maybe about a decade after Gecko implemented the glyph-wrapping behavior for floating first-letter, some folks (primarily Dave Cramer) who were interested in doing better initial letters came to the CSS WG and developed (over a period of years, with quite a bit of interaction and discussion in the working group) a new set of CSS properties with a substantial spec (at https://w3c.github.io/csswg-drafts/css-inline/#initial-letter-styling ) to address first-letter typography.
At some point during the progres of that work, one question that came up was whether the spec should continue to have this vague allowance that implementations could try to do something better (as Gecko, and no other browsers, were doing). Given that we knew at this point that the Gecko behavior, while better, wasn't sufficient to do good typography, this seemed like the right thing to do. As one of the Gecko representatives on the CSS WG, I absolutely could have objected on the basis that we *were* doing something better and would like to continue to do so, and such an objection probably would have led to the WG not removing that allowance from the spec. But removing the allowance, and moving towards better interoperability, was the right thing to do, so I supported removing it. (That's also when I commented on and reopened the bug being discussed here.)
That said, it also didn't seem like removing the better behavior from Gecko was the right thing to do until we had implemented the *even better* new spec with the initial-letter-* properties, which would allow Gecko users to see better-quality typographic first-letters in the new way. (Though there's an obvious trade-off there between quality and interoperability. The opinions of standards bodies and implementers for the Web platform have changed a good bit over the past 20 years on how to make such tradeoffs -- generally towards stricter interoperability at the expense of allowing implementations to do "better" things.) So, back when I was working on Gecko, I thought that we should keep it until we'd implemented the new initial-letter-* properties. It seems like the folks currently working on Gecko made the opposite call. But I think both decisions are reasonable -- there's a real tradeoff there (though the inputs into that tradeoff are likely changing over time as well).
So, really, just saying "hey, they fixed a really old bug" isn't that useful a point to make. There's much more history there. (Also, see https://dbaron.org/log/20080515-age-of-bugs which I wrote 14.5 years ago in response to general criticism about the age of bug reports.)